‘Your Royal Highness, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. When I got to his flat, I found Mr Brudenell dead.’
‘Good Lord,’ she said, gaping at me prettily. ‘How extraordinarily sudden!’
‘It seems he may have committed suicide.’
‘Oh really!’ she said pettishly, as if mainly struck by the inconsiderateness of the action. ‘What an awful bore!’
To relieve Mr Brudenell’s shade of the burden of royal displeasure I perhaps foolishly added: ‘That’s how it looks at the moment. But I’m afraid we can’t rule out the possibility of foul play.’
‘Foul play? Do you mean murder?’
I nodded. ‘It is just a remote possibility.’
‘But how fascinating!’ And she gazed at me with a catlike smile on her face and repeated her earlier exclamation of delighted anticipation: ‘Frightfully exciting!’
CHAPTER 9
Scene of the Crime
The Princess realized almost at once the effect she had made on me with her reception of the news, and for some reason she thought it worth while to try to soften the impression.
‘Of course, it’s quite awful,’ she said, swivelling round her splendid legs to get herself into a sitting position, and then gazing at me with a sincere and concerned expression on her face. ‘He was terribly loyal, you know? and quite sweet in his way. He’s given me an awful lot of good advice and all that, these last two or three years, I mean how to behave and all that, and how to pretend to be interested, which is really an art, I can tell you, and he knew all the tricks . . . Still, I mean, he wasn’t quite human, was he? Hardly a man, would you say? So prissy and correct, you sometimes felt he belonged in another century. More at home with Queen Anne, or somebody. I’m awfully concerned, naturally, but you can’t expect me to care, can you? Not personally, I mean.’
And on thinking it over, I didn’t suppose I could. Her first reaction had at least been natural and sincere, much more sincere than her assumed sincerity. It did seem rather a poor return for Mr Brudenell’s years of service. But it was typical of her that her thoughts were already turning to the future.
‘Actually, I shall probably regret him like hell in a week or two. I mean Aunty will probably inflict somebody much worse on me. The thing was, I could run rings around him, but heaven knows who they’ll send from the Palace now. Of course it would be lovely if it was someone really dishy, but I’m quite sure it won’t be: nobody dishy would take a job like this, and if there was somebody, they wouldn’t give him to me. No, I bet it will be some gaoler, you know? Someone who won’t give me a moment’s freedom. Because they probably don’t trust me an inch.’
I sincerely hoped she was right, but I only said: ‘So you don’t appoint your own Private Secretary?’
‘Oh no. Not on your life. Well, perhaps officially I do, but they have ways.’
She made it sound terribly like the KGB, but I must say that in this case I saw the point of the Powers That Be. I (treacherously) decided to have a word with someone at the Palace, and suggest the qualities I thought desirable in Mr Brudenell’s successor: not a gaolor, exactly, but a damned good animal trainer. Cherishing this thought, I took a ceremonious leave.
‘You will keep me totally informed, won’t you?’ was the Princess’s parting shot. ‘Fancy being in on a murder!’
As I passed through Miss Trimble’s antechamber I had a word with her, telling her to inform whoever was at the moment in charge of the Household that I would need an office somewhere in the Princess’s quarters. Then, as usual, I was flunkied out.
Flunkied out, in fact, by little South Pole — the chilly, fair-haired youth who had interrupted my first talk with Mr James Brudenell. I remembered Joplin’s succinct summing up of what he imagined the situation between those two to be, and in the brown-wooded, lowering corridors I stopped and turned to him. His reluctance to talk flashed momentarily over his face, almost the first sign of emotion I had seen him emit.
‘You’ve heard the news, I suppose?’ I said.
A pause, the significance of which I could not determine. Respectful? A rebuke?
‘Mr Brudenell’s death? Yes, sir. Extremely tragic, sir.’
‘You knew Mr Brudenell well?’
‘Naturally, sir. He was a member of the Household. He was here every day.’
I could of course have pressed him further, but I decided to leave it at that for the moment.
‘I shall need to talk to members of the staff here,’ I said. ‘Do you go off duty in the evening?’
‘I personally, sir? No, I am on duty this evening. I shall sleep at the Palace . . . Excuse me, sir, but does this mean — ?’
‘Yes?’
‘Does this mean you’re not . . . satisfied?’
‘The case has to come before the Coroner, as I’m sure you realize. The police have to collect all the facts for the inquest. I don’t think you should read anything more into it than that.’
‘I see, sir. Thank you, sir.’
Quite respectful he was becoming. We resumed our stately egress from the Palace.
I spent the afternoon at the Yard, getting the details of the investigation as they were sent me by McPhail and his squad. They were the standard stuff of the first hours of an investigation. I also had a word with Buckingham Palace, made an appointment with one of the high-ups there, and suggested — greatly daring — that the Princess should be advised to lie very low as far as her private life was concerned for the next few days: it would do nobody any good if she were photographed at a disco on the day her Private Secretary died. The suggestion was received cordially enough, but I think they had thought of it already.
But what I mainly spent the time on that afternoon was delving into the background of James Brudenell. James Eliot Macpherson Brudenell, to be precise.
It was a sad little story, really. He had come of a fairly good family (which I suppose is like saying of a dog that it’s nearly a pedigree). His father was an Old Harrovian, a sporty type and a high liver, without the income to support his tastes in style. He had acquired a wife and child before he had acquired the ability to hold down a job. He had departed for the Colonies in 1953, intending to bring out his family when he had established himself. But he had no sooner established himself than he had abandoned the intention of bringing out his family. He had been variously a mining executive, a farmer, a Rhodesian Front MP, and was currently in the service of the Emir of Onan (a state in which the Moslem proprieties were rigorously observed, and where a snifter and a bit of skirt must have been grievously hard to come by).
His wife and son, meanwhile, lived in a fairly miserable little semi-detached in Blackheath, on the irregular remittances received from husband and father. A wealthy relative, however, helped with the boy’s education, and he had attended a nearby preparatory school, and later been a day boy at St Paul’s. He was, by all accounts, a cosseted, well-wrapped-up, excessively mothered child. At school he was predictably miserable, having none of the qualities that made for popularity, nor even any that might have given him a small circle of chosen friends. After an undistinguished university career (a third in history from Oriel), he had got himself a job with the College of Heralds — concocting shields for Labour life peers and that sort of thing. After undertaking some special job in the library of Balmoral, cataloguing Queen Victoria’s laundry lists or something, he had gone on to the strength at Clarence House. Thence he had come, rather over two years before, to his present position.
Of private life he had had, apparently, none. He had lived with his mother until a legacy, and shortly afterwards her death, had released him from her increasingly querulous thrall and enabled him to purchase a more eligible address. He seemed to have made little use of his new freedoms. In spite of Joplin’s conjecture, he had never been suspected of homosexual offences (but then the law had been changed when he was about twenty, so that, provided he made sure he didn’t fancy anyone under the magic age of twenty-one, there was no reason why he s
hould be). In any case, if there had been anything of that kind on the records against him, he would certainly not have got his present job. On the other hand, I did wonder whether the Palace had decided that a decently repressed homosexual was just the type needed for a position in the Princess Helena’s household.
His tastes in the wider sense were unexceptionable. He enjoyed a first night at the theatre, on those now rare occasions when a good middle-brow play was to be presented. He sometimes went to the opera, but apparently more for social reasons than musical: he only went to Covent Garden, and one suspected his chief pleasure was in the little supper parties he arranged for after the performance. He was a member of the Monarchist League, and did amateur research work for Debrett and suchlike works. He inserted a memorial notice ever year in The Times for Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria (‘of pious and glorious memory’) between whom and his own family his genealogical ingenuity had discovered a connection. His club was the dullest in London, he had forsworn all political affiliations since Oxford, and he had no close friends as far as anybody knew. A sad, comic, ineffectual little life.
I got the same feeling, later in the day, when I went back with Joplin to his Kensington flat. The photographers and dabs-men had done their work, and the body had been removed to the hygienic anonymity of the morgue. We felt ourselves now more free of the place, and could walk around without holding our breaths, as we had done in the morning. McPhail had kept me posted during the day, and had considerately left us a photocopy of the letter in the typewriter, as well as a note with some of the technicalities of the scientific part of the investigation usefully detailed. The char, we gathered, had been interviewed, and had sworn that the gun used was Brudenell’s, and had been kept in the upper left-hand drawer that we had found open. She and all who knew him swore that he was indeed left-handed. The char had not been in since Monday, but the week before she had done a premature spring-clean: there were consequently very few prints in the flat except hers and Brudenell’s. The caretaker, who was only around during the day, had known nothing of any regular visitors to Brudenell’s flat, and, like the char, had rather suspected that there were none. The Princess and Lady Dorothy had once come to tea, and a great fuss and kerfuffle had been made about that by Brudenell. But that was months ago, and the visit had not been repeated. (‘Thank God. The silly little runt practically disappeared up his own backside with the excitement of it,’ said the caretaker.)
I strolled around the study looking at the books. Brudenell’s tastes in fiction had been staid and rather dated: there were Charles Morgan, Rosamond Lehmann, Pamela Hansford-Johnson, and the first three volumes in Anthony Powell’s Music of Time sequence. There were standard biographies, particularly of monarchs: Cecil Woodham-Smith on Victoria, Wedgwood on Charles I, Ziegler on William IV. A lot of Antonia Frasers. There was a whole shelf of royal memoirs — you know the sort of thing: My Memories of Twenty-Five Reigns, by the Princess Augusta-Alexandrina of Hohenlau-Stauffenberg. Style a cross between a Daily Telegraph leader and a novel by Denise Robins, the whole stuffed with pictures of Nicky and Alicky at Tsarskoe Selo, or Willy and Sophy cruising in the Norwegian fjords. Signing sessions at Harrods in the week of publication, remaindered in the Charing Cross Road six months later. But Mr Brudenell, I felt sure, paid the full price, as he no doubt also did for the unrevealing memoirs of Conservative politicians of the old school or the immensely tedious memoirs of noble personages from the shires, though one of these (Hounds and Horn in the Morning) was personally inscribed to him in the not-very-literate hand of the author.
So far, so predictable.
I went to the desk, across which Brudenell’s body had lately slumped, and took up a copy of the dead man’s last letter.
‘It’s obvious what we are meant to think,’ I said to Joplin, who strolled in from a sniff around the kitchen. ‘Poor old Brudenell has been having it off with some boy or other, and the boy has been milking him for some time. Suddenly the whole business becomes intolerable, and he decides to end it all. Takes the pistol which he conveniently keeps for such emergencies in the left hand drawer, and bang! the soul of Brudenell J. is launched into eternity. Very neat little plot indeed. Why then do I get a whiff of week-old kippers?’
‘For a start, why give in to blackmail?’ said Joplin. ‘Blackmailing queers is dead as a dodo. It’s not against the law.’
‘But it’s not that,’ I said. ‘Because you could imagine Brudenell giving way, in his position: the threat would be not “I’ll go to the Police”, but “I’ll go to the Palace”. The mere hint of anything unsavoury and he’d be gently eased out. But look here, if he’d been shacking up with some desirable plumber’s mate who’d then been putting the finger on him over a longish period, would he begin a letter to him with “I must tell you with great regret — ”.’
‘Well, Brudenell might,’ said Joplin dubiously.
‘No, he wouldn’t. Not to a social inferior. He might to a scion of the nobility, but why would such a chap go with Brudenell? He had no obvious attractions, nor any subtle ones, I would have said. It would have to be some sordid little affair, entered into on the other chap’s part either for money or some other material inducement.’
‘Fair point, I suppose,’ said Joplin. ‘I wonder what that footman’s name is.’
‘We’ll find out later tonight. I’ve lined him up for an interview. What I’m looking forward to is the lab boy’s report on this letter. And on the machine too. I wouldn’t mind betting — ’
‘What?’
‘That up to the word “continue” or thereabouts, there is one hand typing, and that “giving way to the monstrous financial demands you” was typed by a different hand, with different pressure on the keys.’
‘It was an electric machine. Would it show?’
‘Probably, if whoever it was was being careful about fingerprints. It would be less confident, because he wouldn’t want to smudge over Brudenell’s prints. Yes, I’m looking forward to the report on the keys, even if he used gloves, which he surely must have. Hmm. Most of the letters appear in both halves of the sentence, but “d” only appears in the second half, and “j” in the first. I think I’ll tell McPhail to pay particular attention to those. Then there’s the switching-off mechanism . . .’
So I got on to the phone to the dour little man, now back at the Yard, and had a bit of a natter — that is, I nattered to him, and he uttered soft little grunts of agreement. But he did tell me one thing, and when I rang off I relayed it to Joplin.
‘Gun not registered in this country. Apparently bought in the States. Natty little job, as you saw, with enamelled porcelain handle. Perhaps he thought it amusing. It’s the sort of thing American ladies buy if they want to have a go at muggers, rapists or Presidents. Anyway, it did for Brudenell quite as effectively as a more manly instrument.’
‘Those Americans are gun-mad,’ said Joplin.
‘The bullet,’ I went on, ‘certainly came from that gun. The ballistics people said there was no question at all of that. But what gets me is the angle of the bullet.’ I went back to the desk. ‘See — he’s sitting here: the bullet goes down, so it grazes the edge of the desk, down still into the skirting-board under the bookcase. Now, if that scenario we just sketched out was valid, Brudenell would stop typing, reach for the gun, and surely when he did that he would have to straighten up. The bullet would go along to hit the books in the case, or it might go slightly up, but surely it wouldn’t go down.’
‘That puzzled me,’ said Joplin. ‘As it is — ’
‘As it is, it looks for all the world as if he were shot while he was typing, by someone standing above him. How did whoever it was get hold of the gun? Was Brudenell entirely unsuspicious? Did he say nothing when the visitor reached over and got it? Did he keep on typing until he let him have it? Why was Brudenell typing at all in his visitor’s presence? Hardly the thing, by Brudenell’s lights, I would have thought. Still, I can imagine answers to those questions. What I can’t imagine
is Brudenell typing, grabbing the gun, remaining hunched over his typewriter, and shooting himself from above, the hand poised over the head, so that the bullet went downwards into the floor over there in the corner.’
‘I presume McPhail isn’t happy either.’
‘Not at all. He’s got all his wits, even if they don’t seem to send messages to his tongue. I see his men have marked out that space on the table that you noticed.’
We walked over to it, and looked at it together.
‘Of course it could be nothing,’ I said. ‘What he happened to be reading yesterday evening — the death occurred around midnight, give or take a couple of hours either way. It’s the size of the space that puzzles me. It doesn’t seem to correspond with any sort of book I know. Where’s his atlas — that seems most likely.’
We searched through the shelves, and finally came up with the Edinburgh World Atlas.
‘Not big enough by a long way. What else is there?’
We came to a shelf of books too big to go in the normal cases. There were glossy books about stately homes, books of heraldic interest, a book of Hockney reproductions, and a two volume work on Royal Families of the World (‘Bokhassa, Emperor, crowned 1976’ and so on). All of them were weighty tomes, at least in the literal sense, but none of them was big enough to cover the space.
‘Odd,’ I said. ‘It really must have been a hell of a big book. And yet a newspaper would surely be too big. Here, there’s a Times in my briefcase. Try it.’
But it was too big by far. We went through every shelf, and even tried the odd file on his desk for size. It was when we had given up for the night and were walking vaguely disconsolately through the sitting-room that I spotted it.
Death and the Princess Page 9
